Media Scandals

Talking to Bloomberg Politics correspondent Joshua Green on Wednesday, Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer said he was "really quite stunned" by the revelation that ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos gave $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Schweizer called it a "massive breach of ethical standards" for the Bill Clinton operative turned journalist.

In a scathing article for Politico Magazine on Thursday, senior media writer Jack Shafer wrote an obituary for the career of suspended NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams: "At this point, Brian Williams knows he's dead: He's simply negotiating the terms of his burial."

As reported by The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi on Saturday, “A months-long internal investigation of Brian Williams by NBC News has turned up 11 instances in which the anchorman publicly embellished details of his reporting exploits, according to a person familiar with details of the probe.”

Usually liberals have the decency to wait a few months after one of their rape fantasies collapses to start citing the case as "unresolved" -- it was a tie, the game was rained out, we'll never know what happened. But with the apocryphal University of Virginia gang rape, lefties started in right away with the "I guess we'll never know what happened" rewrite.   

Al Sharpton isn't the only MSNBC host who has a problem with paying taxes. Michael Hewlett of North Carolina's Winston-Salem Journal reported on Wednesday that Melissa Harris-Perry and her husband owe "about $70,000 in delinquent taxes, according to a notice filed in Forsyth County Hall of Justice earlier this month." The IRS placed a tax lien on the couple as a result.

When it comes to false media narratives, the typical right-winger should be more concerned with the plank in his own eye than with the speck in the eye of a liberal. That, minus the allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, was the essential argument from Heather Digby Parton in a Wednesday column. Parton sees Rolling Stone’s debunked, retracted University of Virginia rape story as one component of…

Earlier this evening, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued its report on Rolling Stone Magazine's November "A Rape on Campus" story. The report follows up on the magazine's request of Columbia to conduct an independent review of how the disastrously false 9,000-word story made it through to publication. USA Today is reporting that for all the harsh criticism the piece's…

Talking to former CBS political analyst Jeff Greenfield at an event for 92Y in New York, NBC's Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd praised his network's handling of the Brian Williams scandal: "Look, I am proud of my news organization, that it proved that nobody's bigger, nobody is above integrity and credibility. Period." That declaration was prompted by Greenfield taking a shot at how Fox News…

While it's performing a long overdue housecleaning, MSNBC should point its broom in Melissa Harris-Perry's direction and sweep her off the network for her anti-democratic, violence-advocating rant earlier this week at Cornell University. Among other things, Harris-Perry told her audience that George Zimmerman deserved whatever injuries he received at the hands of Trayvon Martin in the violent…

On Monday, Eriq Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter spotlighted how the National Association of African-American Owned Media filed a lawsuit against Comcast and Time Warner Cable which seeks "at least $20 billion in damages from the way the two giants allegedly discriminate against black-owned media." The lawsuit also alleges that Comcast "made large cash 'donations'" to Al Sharpton and his…

On Thursday's CNN Tonight, former CNN correspondent Frank Sesno brushed aside David Corn's supposed expose of Bill O'Reilly's claims about his reporting of the Falkland War: "It's not a Brian Williams problem. I don't think it's anywhere near on that scale." Sesno later added, "I just don't think that this is on a par...[with] the issues, the exaggerations, and the trouble that Brian Williams is…

On Sunday's MediaBuzz on Fox News, Time columnist Joe Klein rushed to the defense of embattled NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams: "I think that we're living in an era where the ferocity of the prosecution is much greater than the severity of most of these crimes. And that's true not only for people like Brian Williams, but also for most of the journal – the politicians we cover."

Appearing on the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary special Sunday night, comedian Martin Short mocked NBC for the ongoing scandal surrounding Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, declaring to the audience of A-list celebrities: “Do you realize that if this roof were to collapse right now, it would be the least of NBC’s problems?”

Frank Pallotta of CNN Money hyped in a Friday article that "in just one week, the media world has lost, in one way or another, four of its titans" – suspended NBC News anchor Brian Williams, liberal Comedy Central host Jon Stewart, CBS correspondent Bob Simon, and David Carr of the New York Times. Pallotta played up that "if the impact of losing Williams wasn't enough, in the same hour on Tuesday…